Office of the Repealer

What a good idea! Sam Brownback, the Republican candidate for governor in Kansas proposed an Office of the Repealer, tasked with finding laws and regulations to cut out.

Mr. Brownback, who said he came up with the idea after traveling around Kansas with a former state lawmaker, said he had grown increasingly frustrated with the sense, in government, that “it’s always, ‘Well, we need this, we need that, we need this.’ Nothing is ever subtracted in the system.”

The repealer, he said, would not mean yet another government salary, but would come from an existing state position, reassigned to the task of elimination. Still uncertain, he acknowledged, is what the new position might cost or where it would fit, exactly, into the existing layers of government in Topeka, the state capital.